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What Are Little Trolls Made Of?

The Anna Raccoon Archives

by Petunia Winegum on March 29, 2015

Venom and bile and all things vile, that’s what Little Trolls are made of. If only we were talking about those misunderstood monsters of fairy tales, the ones doomed to dwell beneath bridges because they no doubt endured abusive childhoods; alas, we are focused on the word’s contemporary meaning, and I say alas because the existence of these cyber psychopaths remains one of the greatest blights on a medium that has, for me, been a beneficial link-up with like-minds around the world.

The application of such an old word to such a modern phenomenon is one of the few occasions in which the changing meaning of a word actually works. Whoever selected it deserves a medal, because nothing else could have been more apt when it comes to those warped wanderers of the worldwide web during the twilight hours. The fairy tale trolls were physically repulsive, coated in warts and boasting numerous visual deformities; we weren’t informed of their opinions on topical subjects, so their ugliness was made evident via their appearance. Their equivalents in 2015 hide behind cartoon avatars, but their eagerness to express their opinions leaves us to form a mental image of the man or woman behind the mask that matches the troll portrait of old.

Although the word had yet to be appropriated anew, what we now regard as trolls were amongst us before the internet; back then, their ability to spew forth instant vitriol was limited by the need to depend upon the Royal Mail to deliver their poison pen letters. Precious time was also consumed by the popular method of cutting out letters from newspapers to compose their messages with, a tedious task that the autistic undercurrent tending to be present in the personalities of such characters probably rendered an enjoyable little duty, all the same. Whereas your average disgruntled social inadequate with a petty grievance would restrict their need to articulate outrage by penning missives to newspapers or ‘Points of View’, the pre-internet trolls had to maintain anonymity because their targets would generally be those that elicited either sympathy or admiration from people with a heart and in possession of common decency.

The recently bereaved, the terminally ill, the wrongly accused, publicised pools-winners, celebrities with an actual talent (don’t forget, I’m talking the twentieth century, not the twenty-first) – all were recipients of old-school hate mail, from the simple profanity-littered letter to the extremity of a live bullet, which pop star Gary Numan once received in the post. The decline in the popularity of the envelope as the vehicle for such a compassionate communiqué was engineered by the email, although it took the advent of mobile phone technology, firstly the text and then twitter, to usher in the age of the troll as we would recognise it.

Most trolls come to their specialist subject from a twisted moral perspective. A story breaks in the media that they somehow feel they are qualified to comment on, airing their groundless expertise and quickly gaining support from their fellow insomniacs isolated in other bedrooms across the country; before long, the back-slapping mutual appreciation society morphs into a chattering community of self-righteous zealots, utterly convinced their stance on the subject in question is beyond reproach. It’s not difficult to discern these are probably people nobody listened to or paid much attention to before the internet arrived; suddenly, their viewpoints have a platform they’d previously been denied and, even better, they have the kind of power to express them that only Fleet Street hacks had held in the Dark Ages.

Had the technology of today existed in 1980, Mark Chapman would probably have been a troll, bombarding John Lennon with abusive texts and tweets; he couldn’t, so he bought a gun instead, condemning himself to life behind bars. Today’s trolls don’t need to go to that extreme; the cleverest can skilfully evade prosecution and imprisonment by closing one account and immediately opening another, firing endless bullets into the backs of their targets under a variety of different nom-de-plumes and maintaining the secret identities that are necessary when unleashing their vicious vendettas onto social media. Were they directing their illiterate vomit at mass-murderers, unelected despots with the blood of thousands on their hands or even corrupt politicians, their methods still couldn’t be condoned, but the motivation behind their choice of target would be a little easier to understand. However, they tend not to take aim at such figures; instead, they select a victim who has usually already suffered some injustice or trauma and add to it.

This curious and inexplicable plan of attack not only implies an absence of empathy characteristic of those capable of cruelty towards their fellow-man, but also hints at a serious mental disorder. The journalist Julie Burchill has made a long and successful career out of being consciously contrary, of championing the discredited and gleefully taking pot shots at perceived wisdom, but at her best she has done so with a wit and mischievous intelligence sorely lacking in the trolls who dominate the medium of the moment, as her notorious and hilarious fax exchanges with American feminist Camille Paglia in the 90s underlined. The trolls who took it upon themselves to find Kate and Gerry McCann guilty of murdering their infant daughter, for example, are typical of the joyless, judgemental, obsessive, opportunistic, miserable, manic, negative, nasty and pusillanimous parasites who feed on the tragedy of people they’ve never met and don’t know.

An unsolved case such as that of Madeleine McCann is a gift to such speculative bullshit, as is the child abuse industry, especially where the alleged abuser is either dead or dying. This is the real Court of Public Opinion, where the actual laws of the land don’t apply and someone is declared guilty if enough trolls agree they are. And what makes the trolls even more convinced they’re on the right track is if someone outside their circles gives them the green light to launch a fresh assault, a General issuing orders to his foot-soldiers. This Commanding Officer knows he doesn’t have to dirty his hands, that his troops will do the donkey work for him, engaging in the kind of dustbin-rooting snooping that was once the preserve of the press. As soon as information has been gathered, it can be released in an instant; no need to purchase a stamp and wait a day or two for the postman to stroll up to the letterbox of the recipient; they can be hit with the information within minutes of it being unearthed.

It’s a tad too simplistic to say ‘ignore it’ if one should wake up to a barrage of bile clogging-up one’s inbox. Just as scurrilous revelations in a tabloid could cause the teeth-gritting target to apply the sticks-and-stones method of coping, their friends and families may not be so resilient. Indeed, the upset trolls revel in causing often affects the nearest and dearest more than it does those who they’ve chosen to aim at. Not that they care; they relish the damage and enjoy nothing better than provoking a foul-mouthed response that will give them the opportunity to indulge in further threats and intimidation. They’re the inheritors of the old protection rackets; don’t challenge their consensus, agree with their opinion, and most of all, never highlight the numerous flaws in their argument, and you’ll be left alone. But dare to speak out…

Care in the Community robbed us of a location in which to house these pitiful bedroom-ridden assassins and what on one hand can be a unifying, enlightening medium has given them a voice that would once have been silenced with ease. They only ever attack the innocent and the good, and if that were their sole crime, it would be enough of a justification to regard them with absolute contempt. They are a plague fuelled by a solitary emotion – hate; and because of that, they are destined to be consumed by it in a very slow and very painful death. Nobody ever told them that love is all you need.

Personally I think the most dangerous trolls work for the newspapers and mass media. Nutters in a room (like me) are harmless tosociety. Nutters with the clout of governmental approval are to be feared. Being in a room with Brenda Leyland seems far less troublesome to me than being in a room with Sir Keir Starmer or Mark Williams-Thomas or a journalist such as Meirion Jones or Dan Davies.

Who would you rather be trolled by? Hollie Greig campaigners or Operation Yewtree?

Certain nutters in a room (not your good self!) may be harmless to society as a whole, but to the individual they hone in on I think the impact can be as horrible as being on the receiving end of a school bully or indeed a bully sanctioned by the media or Westminster.

* I think the impact can be as horrible as being on the receiving end of a school bully or indeed a bully sanctioned by the media or Westminster * Did you know that Dan Davies’ book is in the list for the “Orwell Prize” this year? Wanton vandalism, perhaps far more dangerous to society even than painting Masonic eyes on Scottish cottages.

Ch4 News with Kathy Newman asking if “the Masons need investigating”. The mass media and those consorting with them just now are setting the tone for civic discourse.

The so-called professionals are all dancing to a tune in order to get paid and, they hope, continue to get paid in the great bright future – and, down the line, the raw power of the disturbed and the inadequate is being harnessed by the same forces for much the same reason. Then, as can be seen by those of us with eyes right now, you end up with Troll vs Troll vs Troll – none of whom can be readily identified as being real people on the medium of choice (Twitter). Some of the Trolls will be wild cards, no doubt about it… but in the main this is an agenda being played out by “professionals” using ‘bots’ and people played to act out roles from their darkened fusty bedrooms.

The people nominating malicious works of fiction (masquerading as factual) for awards – be it the ‘Paebrain Award’ for badly-made documentaries or the “Doublespeak” award for a book where corporate PI lawyers are even thanked for “research” – are the same people pushing an online agenda. You cross them at your peril, but we are ‘at war’ anyway, are we not?

Moor, did you ever find out who that particularly vocal troll was who left about 50-odd samples of one-track vitriol on one of your own blogposts a short while back? I’m all for a spirited argument but there is a line, and that particular “Anonymous” seems to have crossed it by a half-marathon or more… As I believe someone on one of these blogs said a while back, free speech is a wonderful thing, it’s just a shame not everyone can be trusted not to abuse it…

Imagine Brenda had been honed in on by a maddy from the Maddie cults. Imagine the mass media headlines about Trolls and Trolling. Imagine the government passing laws, left, right and centre-left to control this scourge on society.

No need to imagine what happened with Sky and Brunt the punt. We have seen how the Establishment reacted. They pleaded “journalistic privilege” and the entire matter was put down to a nutter – we know she’s a nutter becaue well publish all her tweets for you to read… all of you in society that had no idea that there were any Maddie Wars going on in the first place because you cannot be arsed with the internet,,,, but now you all know what a dangerous place it is- full of crazies like Brenda………. oh, and we’ll need some laws about helium balloons – leave no stone unturned.

I know who to fear and it isn’t the other idiots like me on the internet.

@ergathones Why should I be interested? The world is full of nutcases…

I operate via an alias so can hardly complain if others do the same. The reason reason for entering the internet as “Moor Larkin” was because at the time it was generally accepted that the internet was as full of numpties as anyplace else, so to give them in effect the means to find your home address was plainly unwise. What is interesting now is that there is pressure that we must all tell the world who we are if we want to be listened to and taken seriously. I think part of the reason for this is that the mainstream media is relying on the internet for it’s “stories”. But… on the other hand “anonymity is guaranteed” by the legal authorities who are using the real nutters to get each sane folk banged up as the legals see fit.

As always it’s do as we say, not do as we do….

Funnily enough I’ve just got the radio on where some BBC bod is bleating on about ISIS and encryption. The whole thing is hysterical.

Sadly, Petunia, your description of trolls also applies to bloggers, and to commentators on blogs, and therefore we need a further test to discriminate between the three. At one end of the spectrum is originality, and the other, tediousness, but it is a spectrum, and I’d guess that some bloggers are trolls from time to time, and vice versa, and everywhere in between.

Although I know your comment was made in jest – Care in the Community was meant to be there for people with genuinely diagnosed mental health issues – psychosis, depression, OCD etc. The trolls to which you refer are, however, merely nasty individuals who would benefit from neither care, nor kindness, in the community or in an asylum (which was often as much protection for the afflicted as for the rest of us). So I would say I don’t think it was snide, but was somewhat ill-judged. Sorry.

I watched an interview here in Oz with a state Minister for Health who in the early 80s decided Care In the Community was the way to go (and the fact that all the psychiatric hospitals with extensive gardens etc were on highly valuable land was coincidental) …describe how he closed all the hospitals and basically followed the British route : and the result, he lived to regret it as both his sons suffered severed depressive illnesses and found nowhere to go and who both eventually killed themselves.

Now, while I am happy that there are age limits set as to who games may be sold to, I rather think that if I were to point out on the fora of the ‘very concerned of Nantwich, and Arnos Grove’ that actually it is not illegal for those below the set ages to then play said games, I would most likely be hounded as some unspeakable, wart covered, troll – in their view – worthy of being banished from civilised society and prohibited from making any further contributions without some degree of suitable legal supervision

And if I could be identified, doubtless some Muchly Wearisome TVTwat and crew would be banging on my door to parade the very prince of evil before his or her slavering public, asking me loudly if I had a licence to bring up my children or walk down the street

In the grand scheme of things, I have nothing much to really fear from some loony letting his or her little sprog play COD, but i don’t feel half as safe when it comes to the self righteous, opinionated Social Justice Warriors who will happily line up their tanks on my lawn. And on yours.

Especially funny that the Thought Police at the Ministry of Truth then ask people to write in and tell them if they let their children lay these dangerous games… ….. Informing on yourself is a tweak that even the boy George couldn’t have foreseen….

It’s not so much hiding behind a pseudonym; I, and I wouldn’t have thought anyone on here, don’t do so because it gives me the freedom to be thoroughly horrible and nasty to someone else without any comeback. For me, it’s what these wankers do to people who don’t deserve it. Yes, you can adopt the sticks & stones approach to trolls and simply ignore them. But one has to be made of pretty hard stuff for it not to hurt at all. I’ve not once suggested ‘banning’ them or anything along those lines in the piece. I just hate what they do and wish they’d channel their bile into something more constructive. To be powered by hate and nothing else is pretty sad.

IMHO, the trolls attempt to provoke a response, any response. Simply ignoring them, inflicts doubt in their own minds about their own effectiveness (or lack-of). “Don’t feed the trolls” is superb advice to any victim commenter.

However, with Zhang Ziyi within the film and actual life, the less appropriate, its image started to decline, starring Zhang Ziyi of “geisha”, as the film’s plot touches some sensitive Sino-Japanese sentiments among resulted in dissatisfaction users.

However you may not need this service at least for that first year. If you’ve never tried this before, it’s really a feature that will allow you to gain 33 mb a day.

if trolls (in fact ALL people that write messages for publication on the internet – including me) were NOT ALLOWED to hide behind a ‘user name’ but had to give their real name and address to a register that would allow a victim to identify them, just about all trolling would stop. the problem that would then have to be answered is: has the baby been thrown out with the bathwater. I don’t know the answer but if feelings run deep maybe some thought should be given to what is a possible solution.

I got trolled by a creature/acolyte of my ex wife once. It was weird, and I am ashamed to admit it affected me at the time. It was a creepy feeling to see the next notification and wonder – is it another personal attack? I changed accounts, and the troll followed me, and I couldn’t shake it off. Not a nice experience because it was so personal. However, it has been resolved now.

Being trolled may be bad, but local nastiness in a village is worse. Having raised unacceptable abuses on our rec by the local fc, on behalf of a resident, we both had our cars ‘egged’ . No big deal? You try scraping egg off the windscreen & wipers after the sun’s been on it There are old masters’ paintings using egg that have survived centuries. My late wife used to say ‘always forgive, never forget’. Not me. And ex-wives? I’ve had some pain, the guilt can only offset it for so long. After many years I still await the ripple on the black lagoon to remind me of my decades long duties come death.

Trolling is a fishing term, meaning to trail bait through the water to see what bites. On Usenet it was originally applied to posts which were actually intended merely to provoke a response, e.g. fake questions designed to waste the answerer’s time.

I’m guessing that California boys were never even aware of the Billy Goats Gruff connotation. Another example of the English-speaking world becoming riven by the use of a common language…

The generations of people before the Flood had been interested only in themselves; they thought of themselves as supermen and lived each one for himself alone; they used violence and force against their weaker neighbors, paying no attention to laws and rules. The new generation of mankind was different. They stressed the opposite code of living. The individual did not count for himself; he counted only as part of the community, and he had to subject his own interests to those of the group. Had they confined themselves to this kind of social life, all might have been well. But they overdid it. The tremendous strength that grew out of their organization and goodwill made them proud, and their pride made them turn against God. They decided to build a tower which was to reach to heaven, to make them equal to God, and at the same time, to make it possible for them to stay together. This symbol of their divine strength, as they thought, was to be built in the valley of the Land of Shinear. God decided to destroy their arrogance by destroying their ability to understand one another. He, therefore, confused the people by splitting them up into seventy different nations and tribes, each with a language of its own, (hence the name Babel, meaning “confusion”).

I sincerely hope you don’t believe all that you have written in your second paragraph. I sincerely hope you realise it’s just a story to try and explain the observable situation to a collection of credulous people that sought easy – child like – answers to puzzling questions.

Well, if I was to respond to your comment by finding out where you live as well as the names and addresses of your siblings etc and then spread that over twitter under a variety of different names, I’d distinguish that from a simple comment on a blog and would regard it as trolling.

Isn’t that last where it tips over into Stalking? A crime with an already recognisable pedigree?

One of the problems I guess is that those internet-stoics who are quite prepared to tolerate being “trolled” are unlikely to be the sort who would want to complain to a legal “authority”, whereas the sort who make the threats of a stalker will instead be the ones who are only too eager to present themselves as a victim, and so long as a complaint is subjective and petty and so requires no actual investigation or work of any sort from the relevant authority, then they will be only too happy to proceed. Tell the copz that some freako Truther is after your ass and they’ll likely smile like a Cheshire Cat and tell you a nursery-rhyme about about “Freedom of Speech”.

And we still don’t know who put Martin Brunt onto Brenda’s poor ass and why Sky viewed it as in the public interest to make an example of her.

“And we still don’t know who put Martin Brunt onto Brenda’s poor ass ” – probably his news editor. Reporters often are given assignments to follow. The responsibility for broadcasting the results or initiating the item lie further up the editorial food chain.

Hmmm, well maybe you’d be invoking “journalistic privilege” if your higher ups at Sky were the source and you wanted to keep your job. Again, not right, but we live in the real world, and it could be Brunt carrying the can that others won’t shoulder. As for the coroner not following through… I have no idea why that would be.

Moor likely his source was the trolls of the twitterati, akin to the way Exaro are finding their “news” these days, but these bottom-feeders want to pretend they are “the Press”, a higher class of whoring than knee tremblers for sixpence. The upper echelons are merely clinging to the pretence that they are “respectable”.

Journalistic Privilege might be invokeable when you’re bringing down the US president, but driving a citizen to suicide is simple unadulterated bullying by the biggest Troll in the valley of death. They are more dangerous to society than any number of sweepy-faces.

@Petunia Winegum ‘March 29, 2015 Well, if I was to respond to your comment by finding out ….’

I don’t really disagree with much of the gist of what you’re saying, as long as it’s contained within your relatively proper, but perhaps somewhat sophisticated, version on ‘trolling’

But I doubt if common usage is tending towards the maintenance of such finer differentiation.

What I see is it now being used across a range of issues to encompass those who disagree with the views of others, and who can consequently be denigrated in the minds of the broader, more credulous, population as purveyors of ‘hate speech’, with the consequences being that activists, media whores and populist politicians are allied together to bring in measures that will repress people for purely contrary views, no malice being needed.

As someone here said recently, refusal to bake a cake supporting the principles of the UVF, IRA, or even political organisations might raise no qualms, maybe even praise, but refuse to support the principles of same sex marriage and heaven help you.

And say so in the wrong forum, and you will undoubtedly be branded a’ troll’

There are parts of this global interweb which are the Wild West – pretty much lawless areas into which one should only go if prepared for whatever one may find. One may consider the ‘rewards’ worth it, or one may consider the risks of being ‘shot’ to outweigh the potential rewards. You know the risks, you’re an adult, go there at your own peril, just don’t complain to me when it hurts.

There are other parts, of which the Raccoon Arms is one, where intelligent, free-thinking and respectful folk can enjoy the sort of stimulating discussion and informative banter which could never be available in their own physical locality – that’s the best bit of the interweb.

The ‘bathwater’ of trolls elsewhere may be a necessary price we pay for the benefit of the ‘baby’ in these better places. Personally, I’m not a Wild West pathfinder, this grown-up saloon suits me fine.

“What I see is it now being used across a range of issues to encompass those who disagree with the views of others, and who can consequently be denigrated in the minds of the broader, more credulous, population as purveyors of ‘hate speech’, with the consequences being that activists, media whores and populist politicians are allied together to bring in measures that will repress people for purely contrary views, no malice being needed.”

Not seen all of what she posted, nor would I necessarily agree with her, or do the same, but in form and style, isn’t this type of response not getting to be a little too like some sort of civilised Stalinism for comfort?

You remind me of a forum I was on, a long time ago, in another universe. I adopted an unpopulist stance, not out of sheer devilment but because I had made myself aware of a whole swathe of historical facts that the “society” was totally unaware of. As a consequence, I won nearly every argument that developed simply because I didn’t have to bitch, I just produced or used the evidence. Being right did not make me any moor popular; if fact an internet-friend I did have on that forum via an earlier acquaintance became an internet-enemy in due course. However, the reason we fell out permanently was linked to two things that happened. As with most fora there were the leaders of the opinion – Jocks as you might say. There was a true troll on the forum, who was constantly getting it in the ear, but seemed to like the attention. Then one day, one of the Jocks said something along the lines of, ” Mr X and Moor are both trolls but at least Moor has some humour”…. It was quite a WTF moment. I was a bit put out that my erstwhile “friend” made no comment. Things rolled along and then one day another dissenter arrived on the forum. He had also done his research and whilst we didn’t co-operate we were clearly on the same page about our little “controversy”. This new guy however had made a big mistake. He had come onto the forum under his own name.

After a few weeks of our combined efforts usurping the accepted norms, another of the Jocks erupted onto the Thread, with links to this new person’s religious affiliations and indications of his beliefs, which the Jock had found out on the web. The Jock had no sound arguments about the Thread – this was merely a personal attack using publicly available but wholly irrelevant information that was purely designed to denigrate and make this new contributor not “a fit person to have an opinion”. Nobody on that forum said a dickybird, not even when I flew back at the Jock and berated him for being a complete twat and asked that if just because a Pope was catholic, did that mean we should call him a Troll?. Silence. This is how postmodern society works too.

Who are the real trolls? The expressers of opinion or the enforcers of dogma? The big ugly bastards under the bridge who murder the little goats-gruff, just because they can.

Whatever the McCanns did or did not do and about which there is endless speculation, the underlying uncontrovertible fact is that they left small children alone and defenceless for no better reason than to socialise, and to me that in itself is to commit an offence against civilized decency. The Pope should have told them so.

Thinking that – which many people do, and endlessly trolling with deeply personal comments, to say nothing of the physical stalking, phone calls to friends and employers, and blatantly untrue and speculative literature which has been put on the internet for their children to read one day are two entirely different things. Would you not agree?

That is one aspect I find quite horrible and disturbing : the way these tales end up on the net for all the world to see including family members.

It is difficult to comprehend what damage or how cruel this is. Think about the Hampstead residents or Lord McAlpine and Leon Brittan’s family must feel ( and of course the McCann’s). Whilst us unknown older persons can seek out family history which can be fascinating just imagine coming across tales that say your grandad was a satanist baby killer who throttled young boys ins ex orgies at Elm Guest House and no matter how many times you are told this is just lunacy, it must badly affect some people.

Now the Village Gossip / Troll is given pride of place and their denunciations are accepted by so many and even by authorities who have declared that no matter how bizarre, distorted, cruel and unreal your accusation is- you will be believed !

They were with a group of friends who were apparently doing the same thing and they were eating in the holiday complex where they were staying. It seems more a case of acting as a group and having a false sense of security from that and being on holiday. If their daughter hadn’t disappeared, no-one would have known about it or about them regularly checking on their children and thus showing a soft spot that could be poked endlessly afterwards.

They claim to have left their small defenceless children alone. They do have a bit of a track record of being uneconomical with the truth at times. Without the admission of neglect, there can be no abduction.

I have absolutely no idea what happened to the McCann child, I dont even have an opinion. However I do know that the story released via their PR team is not in accordance with the information released by the Portugese police investigation. I suppose that they have the right to manage their reputations by any means available, including PR and media manipulation.

The issue of course is that anyone pointing out inconsistances in the official narrative, or contradictions between the various versions of the narrative, or blatent lies published by the press is labelled a “troll” and its not particularly helpful.

One doesnt need to send hate mail directly to the McCanns to find themselves stalked or harrassed, or included in a dossier. One doesnt need to acuse them of anything. Simply drawing attention to verifiable facts that cast doubt on the official narrative or PR spin is enough to unleash a response.

The use of PR and super injunctions to influence the legal process is the real offence against civilized decency. These issues should be discussed and analysed in a court of law, not in the media. Frankly, I dont wish to hear Mark Williams Thomas pontificating on their innocence or guilt depending in whose paying his fee.

Of course in this really weird cyber world anyone who dares, dares to question the current narrative, let’s say the Hampstead satanic lunacy, is labelled a ‘troll’. So the trolls appropriate everything including the word that describes them so well, and that is why there is real madness behind these joyless souls. And then there are the trolls that follow their heroes- Mark Williams-Thomas comes to mind who recently bemoaned the lack of a way to remove trolls from twitter (and after sending me a tweet that I was “a horrible man”) yet at the same time his army of followers having seen his tweet to me ( and what a privilege being unblocked for a moment by the Great Man) – and I only mean his followers that he follows back- turned upon me with a vengeance. In the end I thought I am really surrounded by complete madness- not frightened at all (I stopped being frightened when I was shoved through a store window delivering a summons to the shopkeeper 25 years ago) but puzzled- where all these mad trolls always there or is the internet breeding them?

A few years back, while doing research at the National Archives, I was included to look at the microfilm of letters sent to the Home Secretary, David Maxwell Fyfe, at the time he was considering whether the hapless Derek Bentley should swing or not. I consider myself to be fairly unshockable, but the language penned in late 1952 by those in both the “for” and “against” camps in trying to encourage Maxwell Fyfe to their way of thinking was still quite hair-raising.

More than a few years ago I had my very own troll on a Usenet newsgroup devoted to the small pond of an interest in which I could porobably be counted as no more than a medium-sized fish. He (I very much doubt it was a she) appeared out of nowhere, posting under a variation of my real name, and casting doubt on various quite old activities in said pond that has raised me somewhat above the level of the smaller fish. In particular he claimed that he had met me, and that I had given him a videotape, supposedly of something he wanted, that actually turned out to be blank. Obviously I knew he was talking complete bollocks, even before he clarified that said meeting took place in a city other than the one I lived in, in a year when I did not visit that city at all. The meeting was also supposed to have taken place because I was in that city for a convention relating to something I would not, in real life, have been seen dead attending. Eventually he started claiming that he had met someone else who had been pretending to be me, which was quite ironic under the circumstances.